As bloggers and social media marketers, we often forget that customers and readers are the most important part of why we create new content, work hard on blogs, and market our products and services over the internet. Blogging and social media are not a one-sided activity, and you must do everything you can to make your blog user friendly. Adding value to the reader of your blog is essential if you want to be successful. Here are some great plugins that make your readers experience more enjoyable and even gives back to them.

1. Sexy Bookmarks: I used to be a big fan of the “Share This” plugin, but I started to question if readers knew what it was. The single link to catch all social bookmarking options is nice and clean, but I like the look of sexy bookmarks, and I feel that it prompts readers to share the article in a better way. Update: Don’t have this activated right now, because it keeps forcing all of the text on my blog to be centered. I submitted a help ticket to the developer, so we’ll see what he comes up with!
2. Blog Traffic Exchange: This is a great plugin, and there are no other plugins like it, to my knowledge. The concept works much like related posts plugins, but instead of links to your own posts, it links to other relevant blog posts from bloggers in the Blog Traffic Exchange network. This is a great way to naturally build incoming links to your blog, and it adds value to your readers by suggesting relevant links to other blogs.
3. Subscribe To Comments: Ever submit a comment to a blog but forget to check back to see the answer to your question or reactions from other commenters? Commenting is all about starting a conversation with the author and other commenters about the content written, but it’s hard to follow up and engage in conversation when you don’t come back to that conversation. Subscribe to Comments plugin allows you to subscribe to the commenting through email.
4. WP Touch: Turns your blog into a user-friendly and iPhone friendly website. It’s much easier to navigate through your blog on the iPhone with this plugin.
5. WP Greet Box: Easily prompts new visitors to subscribe to your RSS feed or join your Facebook page or Twitter profile.
6. WP Sticky: Allows users to feature a post at the top of their homepage for a day or permanently.
7. Comment Luv: This plugin will visit the site of the comment author while they type their comment and retrieve a selection of their last blog posts, tweets or digg submissions which they can choose one from to include at the bottom of their comment when they click submit.
8. WP-Polls: Adds an AJAX poll system to your WordPress blog. You can easily include a poll into your WordPress’s blog post/page. WP-Polls is extremely customizable via templates and css styles and there are tons of options for you to choose to ensure that WP-Polls runs the way you wanted. This is a great way t get you readers to start interacting on your site. Most readers won’t bother to leave a comment, but many of those readers WILL participate in a poll. You can even have readers vote on what topics to write about!
9. Tweet MeMe: Allows readers to easily re-tweet a link to your article, and it’s easily found in the upper left or upper right corner of the article much like the popular digg button.
10. WP Best Posts Summary: I hate writing link posts, especially ones with links to my own sites, but users don’t like sifting through dozens of pages to get caugh up on most recent posts, and this plugin automatically generates a daily, weekly, or monthly post with older articles.